Cricket: Fluent Vaughan punishes West Indies

England Under-19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .292-5

West Indies Under-19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .202-8

England win by 90 runs

ANYONE full of gloom and despair about English cricket should drop in on the Under-19 side. At Grace Road yesterday they demolished the West Indies by 90 runs in the first one-day international. Moreover, you will have to go a long way before seeing a better exhibition of batting than Michael Vaughan's 122.

The Yorkshire opener, tipped as a full England player of the future by the watching Leicestershire coach Jack Birkenshaw, needed only 98 balls to reach three figures. His partnership of 144 from 31 overs with Nottinghamshire's Matthew Dowman virtually decided the match after England had been put in.

It led them to their highest one-day score. After only a week's acclimatisation, the West Indies found length and line elusive on a chill day in a blustery wind. They clearly have much work to do before the next game at Chelmsford tomorrow

Vaughan picked up runs with impressive fluency all round the wicket but especially in the arc between mid-on and mid-off. The left-handed Dowman, possessing a chunky build reminiscent of the former Nottinghamshire batsman, Norman Hill, missed little off his legs. It was symptomatic of the tourists' problems that their first wicket- taker, Andre Percival, was the seventh bowler to appear.

Their partnership was the highest for any wicket against the West Indies at this level, beating the 114 by Mike Gatting and Matthew Fosh in Trinidad in 1976. Not long after that Fosh surprisingly gave up the game to run a pop group; whatever happened to that chap Gatting?

Photograph, page 34